Make your own pizza cake

I always get a kick out of food that looks like one thing, but is really another. I’m not talking about soy “meat” that bears a vague resemblance to chicken (since a lot of it always looks kind of like chicken regardless of what flavor it’s supposed to be). I’m talking about sweet desserts that are disguised as savory dishes.

Dessert pizza is not a new concept – in fact, a pizza dough finished off with sweet toppings, such as chocolate, marshmallow or fresh fruit is even seen on fast food pizza menus. But desserts that really look like savory pizzas are very novel, and not difficult to make. YumSugar pointed out a simple pizza cake recipe that uses a yellow cake topped with strawberry jam and grated white chocolate for the cheese. The effect is great, and it literally takes 5 minutes to put together once the cake is baked. There are plenty of other pizza cakes out there, too. Other pizza cakes start out with the same type of round, vanilla cake base, but really go all out with the toppings. This one calls for chocolate malt balls to substitute for sausages, while another suggests using Buncha Crunch for a more “realistic” look. Green and white gumdrops can be rolled out to approximate slices of onion and green bell peppers, red fruit leathers can be cut into pepperoni shapes and raisins are not a bad stand in for olive pieces.

The most creative pizza cake I saw was at the Barefoot Kitchen. This cake used a lemon sponge pie – puff pastry crust, lemon sponge filling (not unlike a lemon pudding cake)- and finished it off with all the usual pizza cake finishes, along with a touch of apricot jam to give it a greasy look. The result looked fantastically like a deep dish pizza, with a layer of cheesy (but sweet) filling in a deep crust.

I just wanted to correct something, though. The crust was puff pastry dough, not lemon sponge cake, and the filling was lemon sponge pie, which is a sort of custardy-on-the-bottom,-light-and-airy-on-the-top pie filling.